Hertzberg was the main event at Contra Costa Supervisor Karen Mitchoff’s luncheon speaker series on Thursday at the Marriott Hotel in Walnut Creek.

He is undeniably entertaining and he made performance-based budgeting sound like something everyone should run out and buy today. He cracked jokes. He was passionate. He didn’t bury us in technical details.

But the best part of his speech was his story about how he met billionaire Nicolas Berggruen, the founder of the state’s other big reform organization, the Think Long Committee for California.